The Three Wise Men have already headed to Spain and with them, advertising with gift options for Christmas. One of the novelties this year has been the advertisements for bracelets and stuffed animals of marine animals that come with the “adoption certificate” of a real whale, turtle or shark. A document that supposedly allows you to follow the “adopted” animal and monitor its movements in the ocean over time. The reality is that it is a practice described as a “scam” by NGOs and users both in the press and on social networks in other parts of the world.
These types of pages promote themselves as organizations that support the conservation of marine fauna and ensure that their objective is to protect turtles, polar bears, dolphins or coral reefs. For this reason, they promote their products as a form of consumption with a cause and to finance research or ocean cleanup programs. However, behind this marketing strategy there are products made in China that are sold with capital gains of 1,000% or more thanks to the adoption and monitoring certificate that comes with them.
A certificate that is based on scientific data published by NGOs and scientific associations, used for commercial purposes “without permission”. This was reported at the beginning of 2023 by the Sea Turtle Conservancy, a sea turtle support organization based in Florida. “Companies operating under various names advertise on Facebook, sell products online and illegally use STC turtle tracking maps as an add-on for buyers,” he warned in a statement: “Do not be fooled or support scammers !”
Bombing of advertisements in Spain
After spending a few years advertising to users in the US and Latin America, Christmas 2024 has been the starting signal for this type of pages to appear on Spanish networks. The most active is Club Ocean, which currently has up to 77 active ads on Instagram and Facebook, according to the Meta advertising libraryeach with several versions. He has also paid to promote 47 other tweets on X since November.
“Each Bracelet directly contributes to planting coral in the world’s coral reefs”, “follow your own sea turtle in the oceans” or “help save the whales” are some of the slogans shown in the advertisements. Meta does not report the money invested or the number of views achieved through its networks as it is not political advertising, but the links to the ads provided by X allow us to verify that on this platform alone they have more than 40 million impacts.
But Club Ocean’s reputation precedes it. In many of their ads on the sale of products at a premium and without ties to the non-governmental organizations that it claims to finance through its activities. Scam”.
Club Ocean assures that it allocates 50% of its profits to donations to environmental organizations, with amounts around 500 euros. elDiario.es has contacted a dozen of the associations it names on its website. At the close of this information, four of them had responded, and they have responded that these donations actually occurred. However, they all emphasize that these were one-off donations made unilaterally and not associations in long-term projects.
“Unfortunately, this is not a new issue. Indeed, Club Ocean made us a donation of 500 euros, but it was never a partnership between our organizations, and we let them know this on several occasions, asking them to change certain ambiguous formulations or to delete certain photos,” says Jean- Marc Gancille, one of those responsible for Globea cetacean conservation NGO on Reunion Island and the Indian Ocean.
The brand promise is simply false. There is not enough long-term monitoring of animals to justify the purchase of an individual bracelet
Globe
— NGO for the conservation of cetaceans in the Indian Ocean
“This donation was made 3 years ago and should no longer be used as a guarantee for an activity that we consider very stretched,” Gancille continued via email: “The brand’s promise is simply false. “There is not enough long-term monitoring of the animals to justify the purchase of an individual bracelet.”
“Your email is an opportunity to write to them again and ask them to remove it from their website,” concludes the NGO. This is the complaint of almost all organizations specialized in this type of tracking: tracking maps are not intended to be a long-term commercial activity and errors or failures can occur in tracking devices. In the case of Club Ocean, Sea Turtle Observancy even denounced that the page invented the movements of the animals.
“They basically invented fake turtles, fake maps. They are not real. We know this because we saw some of the images using our photos, our turtles, and we realized that they were fake. “They were showing turtles being released and moving to places where we know turtles don’t really go,” its director warned last year in an article in the Mexican media. The Economist.
Aliexpress Bracelets
This individualized monitoring of the animals, which Club Ocean sells as an “adoption” process despite NGOs denouncing that it makes no sense, is the added value that allows the page to sell the same bracelets as on Aliexpress for 22.95 euros. They are less than two euros. In the case of the stuffed animals, prices rise to 27.55 euros, but at this moment the page assures that they are all sold out.
This is a situation that has been reported by many users in the countries where Club Ocean has focused its advertising until now. The company, which says it has its official headquarters in Switzerland, was forced to respond through its website that “they have never hidden” that their products come from the Asian giant, but that “in 2024 it is possible to have an eco-responsible approach.” and work with China.”
“100% of the raw materials used come from short, local circuits in China. Equivalent manufacturing in Europe would be less sustainable with the inevitable various import and export transports. And in addition to the reduced ecology, the costs would not allow us to offer the monitoring experience, associative support and awareness at a low price. That is why we prefer to minimize our ecological impact and maximize the donation margin,” they say.
“Our added value lies in the support of associations and in the animal geolocation experience that no other brand provides,” they defend: “So NO, the bracelets on Chinese websites are not the same and do not participate in any way in the cause we defend.”
Who does the geolocations?
The trap of this type of pages began to come to light at the beginning of 2023 with the notice of Sea Turtle Conservancy. The NGO then revealed that more and more people were contacting them to complain that their “adopted” turtles were not moving or that they had mysteriously appeared in another ocean.
“If you have been scammed, please DO NOT email or call STC about not receiving your order or if you have questions about your turtle. Unfortunately there is nothing we can do,” the statement highlighted.
If you have been scammed, please do not email or call STC about not receiving your order or if you have questions about your turtle. Unfortunately there is nothing we can do
Sea Turtle Conservancy
— Sea turtle monitoring NGO
“The biggest drawback for STC (aside from having our copyrighted information stolen) is the valuable staff time that is wasted responding to people’s complaints instead of actually working to protect sea turtles,” he highlighted, asking those affected to contact the consumer organizations or social networks where they had seen the advertisements.
If the Sea Turtle Conservancy has claimed to be the source of the turtle location data, it is suspected that other non-profit conservation organizations, such as Search wave Polar Bear International They are the ones that serve as a platform for Club Ocean’s tracking of dolphins, whales and polar bears. Its maps are very similar to those offered on the web.
Club Ocean claims that Sea Turtle Conservancy’s criticism is because they have an agreement with the competition. “We made a donation to them to propose a partnership without knowing that they already had a contract with a competitor and they took advantage of the opportunity to publicly discredit us. The problem was resolved more than a year ago by our lawyers, this association has a contract with one of our largest competitors who tries to harm us by discrediting us,” he asserts in a statement sent to this medium. elDiario.es has requested proof of this assertion, but Club Ocean has not provided it.
“Regarding animal tracking by GPS, we have contracts with our associative partners, who collect this data and transmit it to us. These data are reprocessed by our experts to prevent malicious people from attacking the animals,” they say about the tracking of the animals. Once again, this editorial team has asked Club Ocean about those associations that provide it with data, something that all the organizations contacted deny, but has not received a response.
Regarding user complaints about why many of them have “adopted” and follow the same animal, the page answers that “it is normal: the cost of creating and maintaining an animal geolocation page cannot be covered with the margin of a single bracelet. We propose a lot of tracking to prevent the same person from following the same animals, but it is possible for the same animal to be followed by several people.”
#euro #bracelet #pay #adoption #marine #animals #accused #scam
